In early modern England, spectral figures were regular visitors to the world of the living and a vibrant variety of beliefs and expectations clustered around these questionable shapes. Yet whilst historians have established the importance of ghosts as cultural resources that were used to articulate a range of contemporary concerns about worldly life, we know less about the social and personal dynamics that underpinned the telling, recording, and circulation of ghost stories at the time. This article therefore focuses on a unique set of manuscript sources relating to apparitions in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England to uncover a different vantage point. Drawing on the life-writing and correspondence of the antiquarian who collected the narratives, it lays bare concerns about familial relations and gender that ghost stories were bound up with. Tracing the way that belief in ghosts functioned at an individual level also allows the recovery of the personal religious sensibilities and spiritual imperatives that sustained and nourished continuing belief in ghosts. This subjective angle demonstrates that ghost stories were closely intertwined with processes of grieving and remembering the dead, and they continued to be associated with theological understandings of the afterlife and the fate of the soul.
Angelology – the science of angels – exercised a compelling hold on the medieval and early modern mind. The role that angels had in the belief and ritual associated with death was perhaps its most theologically resonant aspect – angels were intimately involved in the system of eschatology and the rites associated with dying, mourning and burial. Their responsibilities at the end of life included participation in the cosmic struggle enacted around the deathbed, where good and evil angels were thought to contend for the custody of the soul of the dying; and stewardship of the soul after death, when angels were believed to carry it to its final resting place, as Lazarus was carried to Abraham’s bosom in Luke 16: 19–31. However, angels also assumed important responsibilities after death; they featured prominently in the narrative of the Last Judgement and the strategies adopted by Christians to conceptualize and prepare for the afterlife and the events of the Apocalypse.
This article is based on the spiritual life‐writing of puritan merchant and antiquarian Ralph Thoresby (1658–1725). It uses this material to explore patterns of individual devotion and contributes to our knowledge of the nature of contemporary spirituality, speaking to ongoing debates about reading practices, the nature of public and private forms of worship, and the creation of religious identities. It concludes that Thoresby’s personal devotion was fundamentally shaped by his friends, associates and the local context in which his life was embedded, yet beyond this distinctive local flavour strong similarities existed between Thoresby’s experience and that of other devout contemporaries.
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